u/ClarityEnjoyer

I was thinking the other day about how the game was doing, and I realized that I’ve never seen an ad for this game, outside of a single Reddit ad.

I get ads for a lot of indie games, fighting games, live-service games, and Nintendo games on YouTube. But despite watching a lot of Smash content and Rivals 2 content, I’ve never gotten a single ad for Rivals 2. This is all just anecdotal evidence, but I wonder if pushing more ads might help the game?

I’m not really sure what the strategy is for this game to get new players, apart from word of mouth. The occasional creator tournament might be how people learn about the game? I know a lot of people don’t really bother to watch a streamer if they’re playing a game they’re not interested in, even if it’s a streamer they like.

Has anyone else seen any ads for Rivals 2? Do you think making more would help?

The day that Rivals 2 comes to consoles is likely going to be the day where more public eyes are on it than any other point in its lifetime, so when it happens, it needs to be right. It needs to be in a polished enough state so that when people pick it up, they don’t get a bad impression. It also needs to have enough content so that people don’t feel ripped off for spending $30 on a game that feels similar in scale to most free-to-play live-service games.

Ideally, it would have just as much content as Rivals 1’s state when it came to consoles. Enough modes to rival the first game’s Abyss mode, Story mode, and Tetherball. But it seems like it’ll be years before Rivals 2 has enough modes to match all that, with 3D assets being much more costly to make, and the team needing to downsize recently.

According to the roadmap, the plan seems to be to launch once Story Mode: Chapter 1 is complete. But if it’s only an hour or two, which “Chapter 1” seems to be implying, then that may feel a bit lacking compared to the $30 price tag. Plus, I imagine making unique assets for story mode takes a lot of time and money.

If it were up to me personally, what I’d want is some very replayable co-op mode that also has the option to play with friends or randoms locally or online, that hopefully doesn’t necessitate lots of new assets. Maybe a roguelike mode like NASB2.

What do you guys think? How much does Rivals 2 need to be appealing to casuals who might not even use online that much? Do you think it’s content-complete enough to just put it on consoles as it is now?